Over the last 10 years, AvePoint and NetApp have partnered to build software to support customers running SharePoint on NetApp hardware rollouts. Some of the largest SharePoint environments in the world are currently running this technology to handle tiered storage planning, disaster recovery, and day-to-day backup and recovery through the NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint (SMSP) product.

With the release of DocAve 6 Service Pack 8 in 2016, AvePoint has taken on primary support of NetApp SMSP customers, incorporating the best of the OEM for all AvePoint customers to benefit from.

Full Farm Protection with NetApp Snapshots

The best and strongest use case for pairing NetApp storage systems with DocAve backup and recovery continues to be the total protection of all SharePoint server assets with incredibly fast snapshots. Within minutes, run complete backups for all content, configurations, and virtual servers, allowing critical SharePoint deployments to achieve aggressive recovery point objectives (RPOs) that are not available without this technology. This solution is capable of covering:

• Virtualized application servers
• SharePoint content and configuration databases
• Web Front-End servers (WFEs)
• Search Servers

Disaster Recovery with NetApp SnapMirror

All snapshots driven by DocAve can fully use both SnapVault for long-term snapshot retention as well as SnapMirror for multi-site disaster recovery. DocAve can leverage these secondary snapshots to:

• Clone and create entire SharePoint farms in minutes, including QA or testing farms
• Create read-only disaster recovery environments at offsite locations
• Recover from snapshots stored on secondary sites or locations

Customers have been able to use this solution, combined with AvePoint’s High Availability product, to replicate SharePoint farms to warm standby sites distributed across multiple geographies. This includes the ability to automatically failover and fall back disaster recovery operations for production environments, for the purposes of testing disaster recovery, or even simply to move to secondary locations during critical downtime and patching for the primary site.

Service Application Coverage for SharePoint Server

Combining NetApp snapshots with DocAve Backup and Recovery technology gives users a huge amount of flexibility on recovery from these snapshots, especially when it comes to farm components. You can leverage this solution to recover in the event of:

• Service application corruption and recovery
• Managing customizations and rollback on WFE servers

Day-to-day Backup and Recovery for SharePoint

The traditional and most common use case for our product comes in the day-to-day activities of any SharePoint administrator: the rollback and recovery of sites, lists, items, and document versions for end user requests. AvePoint maintains a full index of all data in NetApp snapshots to provide single-item recovery on demand whenever users need protection.

Tiered Storage Policies for Large SharePoint Deployments

In addition to the snapshot-based workloads above, customers can also use this integration with NetApp’s Data ONTAP to tier storage commonly reserved in SQL content databases using Microsoft’s Remote BLOB Store (RBS) technology. Based on flexible business rules and common content lifecycle policies, documents that fall into disuse can be automatically tiered to lower cost disks in NetApp storage systems, or across other cloud and on-premises storage providers.

When integrated with NetApp storage system backups in DocAve, snapshots of these storage locations are automatically included in any SharePoint backup plan.

Built on a Solid Foundation

AvePoint leverages a number of NetApp’s platform solutions to accomplish some of these incredible features. AvePoint’s DocAve platform integrates with:

• SnapManager for SQL’s database snapshot technology
• SnapDrive for Window’s protection of file systems
• SnapManager for Hyper-V for virtual machine (VM) protection
• Virtual Storage Console for protecting VMWare deployments
• SnapMirror for data replication
• SnapVault for long-term data retention

If you’re interested in seeing these capabilities, reach out to your AvePoint sales rep!

Transitioning from NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint to DocAve

As we’ve previously announced, AvePoint has taken over direct support and distribution for the incredible technology we’ve developed with NetApp. If you’ve already been leveraging these features through SMSP, you’ll find a welcome upgrade waiting for you in your move to DocAve 6.8.2.

Migrating to DocAve for NetApp Storage Systems

Good news: Your existing data, settings, plans, and configuration will automatically transition to DocAve after your first install of the DocAve 6 Service Pack 8 Cumulative Update 2 software. DocAve 6.8.2 includes the ability to leverage existing SMSP 8.2 configuration databases, automatically restoring all connections to existing NetApp storage systems and snapshots during installation. No downtime is required to make this transition happen – simply replace your existing SMSP agent and manager installations with DocAve 6.8.2 agents, and all plans and policies will automatically continue protecting your data.

AvePoint representatives are here to help you make this transition as smooth as possible!

Staying on NetApp SnapManager for SharePoint

If you choose to stay on your legacy versions of SMSP, you are still covered by your support and maintenance agreements with AvePoint and NetApp. We’re still here to support you and make your SharePoint environment as successful as possible!